I am building a new box that I plan to use mostly for knoppmyth, but I want to partition 60Gb or so for vista. I would like the ability to dual boot to knoppmyth or vista, but have it default to knoppmyth.

I am hoping to get some advice on how to do this. Must I make the partition before I get started, or can I just install knoppmyth and then make a partitiuon for windows later down the road?

Is there suggested software or proceedures for doing this? Thanks!

Hi,
It can be done. Install M$ first as it is a hog and takes the whole drive, no play nice. I suggest Ubuntu and do triple boot as it very handy later with out many issues.

I don't install M$ but sometimes save what is on a drive for what ever reason escapes me currently, oh yes, cause it was my work machine
I kill the virtual windows memory, defrag and the use Gparted live to resize the M$ partition. I then divide out the rest to be swap xda2, reserve 5gig in xda3 for ubuntu, logical out xda4 to be xda5 and xda6 for myth-os and /myth.

Manual install myth into partion xda5, load boot loader into partition (not to mess up mbr and kill M$) when done, reboot into and install Ubuntu into xda3. Do the setups of the partitions. have it format the swap and depending on the size, and how you plan to use it, you can format xda6 at the same time. It will pick up the windows properly and should pick up km also.

There are a couple of other little tricks, one very inportant one is to save a copy of the ubuntu /boot/grub/menu.lst somewhere as some of the ubuntu upgrades update that file and it makes KM go into hiding. By having the spare copy , you an simply copy and paste what you need. Later if you upgrade KM, simply change a couple of charactors and good to go again vmlinuz-2.6.15-chw-2

Maybe that gives you some ideas.
Mike

I was just looking for an answer to this very question. I have XP for work, and use Ubuntu for daily tasks. I hade room for KM on the drive but was struggling with lilo/grub problems. Now I see the order =)

Thanks much.

Mike,

I tried to do what you described here, and my whole MBR got wiped out (by Knoppmyth). I went thru a manual install and told knoppmyth to only install the boot loader to the Knoppmyth partition, but for some reason it destroyed my whole MBR and my system was unbootable. The only way to regain the ability to boot the PC was to install another linux distro (PCLinuxOS 2007) and let it write to the MBR.

I was trying to do my install on a SATA hard drive, is there some limitation with Knoppmyth and SATA drives? Or was it just a freak accident that my MBR got hosed? Thanks,

Brad

Hi,

Sorry to hear about the mbr. Most likely what happened and maybe I should have pointed it out is that when you select some item during install with the arrow keys, you must press the space bar to mark the X This applies to the install partition selection as well as the boot loader to partition choice.

Actually you did not hose the machine as if you had continued and installed the ubuntu you should have been able to recover the windows also. It is a simple entry in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

Try reinstalling windows and do it again as it works. Adjust the partition sizes to your needs. Only problem I have is going between the systems is windows keeps messing with the clock but nptdate fixes it quickly.

Mike